If you weren’t one of the 10 people that were there, I’m afraid you might have missed great conversations and the perfect opportunity to sharpen your “coding blade”.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jhandelman/3642432193/

Our challenge this time was to code a basic calculator. Using a 7-minute timebox for every programming pair, everyone there got a chance to code some PHP. The final version of our calculator is available at the OrlandoPHP github account.

We had very interesting topics coming up during our session, such as exception handling, type systems and xUnit testing conventions.

At a given point, we were surprised to see how PHP reacted when a function was invoked with more parameters than the ones defined in its signature. We were in a situation where we had the following function:

public function add($num1, $num2){ ... }

and we wrote a test expecting to throw some sort of syntax error:

$result = $calculator->add(5,5,10)
$this->assertEquals(20, $result);

But instead, we got an assertion error:

1) 5+5+10 should equal 20 but got 10 at [/Users/caike/Projects/Katas/02-Calculator/CalculatorTest.php line 92]
	in test_add_multvals
	in CalculatorTest
FAILURES!!!
Test cases run: 1/1, Passes: 9, Failures: 1, Exceptions: 0

In this case, we figured PHP behaves just like JavaScript and simply ignores all of the arguments that exceed the ones defined in the signature of the function. Humm… interesting.

After our coding, we did a retrospective and the following points were raised:

• Everyone actually got to pilot and co-pilot this time!
• Technically, we shouldn’t rag the pair so much while they’re coding.
• We should probably get to a standard EDITOR.
• Practical applications? What about the Google TDD Problems
• Let’s get food next time!
• Need a mouse, too…

Make sure you join our google group to know when our March session is going to take place.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

If you want to come hack with us and exercise your agile techniques such as pair-programming, test driven development, refactoring, SOLID principles and others, feel free to join us at 7PM at the following location:

Camden apartments in downtown Orlando – courtesy of Demetrius Ford, our resident resident and official “Location Coordinator” for the OrlandoPHP.

The address is:

688 N Orange Ave
Orlando, FL 32801
(map)

You can park in the parking lot in front of the complex and in the adjacent lot, just not in the garage. The clubhouse is inside the main complex, secured by a maglock, and it’s super sweet. We’ll try to leave someone outside to lead people in, but try to come earlier rather than later.

If you get locked out, just ping one of us by cell phone (321-352-1689) or Twitter; we will try to keep an eye on the @orlandophp account and #orlandodojo.

For more info, check out the orlando php meet up group.

Actually before the dojo session we had a nice conversation about user stories and the planning poker technique, where David Rogers shared his experience using these agile practices in his own company.

We spent about 20 minutes talking about the problem and presenting the tools to the 11 participants. For this session we used PHPUnit as the testing framework and Eclipse as our IDE/text editor.

Hardcore test driven development went on for about 40 minutes, where each pair had 7 minutes of coding.

After a few cycles we did a retrospective of what we’d done so far. Very interesting points were discussed:

1. There is a moment where the simplest thing that could possibly work starts turning into the stupidest thing that works and we find ourselves in a mess.

2. We should never test the language/platform. But how about when we have a business requirement that says, for example, once a price is assigned to a product then it must never be changed and we choose to meet that requirement by using a private instance variable ? Is there a way to write a test for that without ‘testing the platform’ ?

3. The Code Breaker problem involved testing a single external behaviour. Only one public method was being tested – besides the constructor – so getting the problem solved was all about using different input values and checking for the expected output.

The Coding Dojo is all about exercising our techniques and being exposed to new ones. We all end up learning new things, even if it’s just a different keyboard shortcut that will save us a couple of seconds typing.

I hope everyone had a good time and make sure to join our google group in case you haven’t already!

I hope everyone had a great holiday and did not forget to include ‘LOTS OF PROGRAMMING PRACTICE’ in your new year’s resolution list

Our second Coding Dojo session will be held tomorrow, February 7th with the local PHP group. We’ll be doing the Randori Kata, where everyone who wants to participate gets a swing at pair programming. Should be fun.

The meeting will be held at the clubhouse at Camden apartments in downtown Orlando – courtesy of Demetrius Ford, our resident resident and official “Location Coordinator” for the OrlandoPHP.

The address is:

688 N Orange Ave
Orlando, FL 32801
(map)

You can park in the parking lot in front of the complex and in the adjacent lot, just not in the garage. The clubhouse is inside the main complex, secured by a maglock, and it’s super sweet. We’ll try to leave someone outside to lead people in, but try to come earlier rather than later. If you get locked out, just ping one of us by cell phone or Twitter; we will try to keep an eye on the @orlandophp account and #orlandodojo.

For more info, check out the orlando php meet up group.

Feel free to look around our github network for the Code Breaker and look at each other’s solution.

Thanks Gregg for setting up the problem and having us at Colab Orlando. Great place!

We’re holding our next session in the upcoming PHP user group meeting on January 7th. If you’re interested in joining us, checkout http://meetup.orlandophp.org for more info on that.

I wish everyone a good holiday and hope to see you all soon!

See you guys there!

We have just officially started and would be glad to have you join us for a session.

All skill levels are welcome!

For more info: http://groups.google.com/group/orlando-dojo